The Death of a Hungry God

The Death of a Hungry God

Paul Keil

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A Patchwork of Elephant-Human Landscapes

Throughout India, once-interconnected forest habitat is now fragmented into isolated patches separated by farmland, infrastructure, and other developments. Elephants are adapting to these shifting environmental conditions. They stitch together foraging ranges that incorporate both forest and village spaces. In a village close to Gajbari, this adult makhna (tuskless male) regularly passes through people’s properties and over adjacent train tracks to access a nearby wetland. He is well-known to locals—and he likes to follow his preferred routes.

Paul Keil

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Rhythms of Rice Cultivation

A farmer guides cows in circles over harvested rice straw, separating the grain from the stem. Rice is the staple diet of the Assamese, and the rhythms of people’s lives in rural areas are deeply tied to rice agriculture. Rice farming has shaped the landscape, diet, daily practices, and rituals of Assam. The state’s major celebration, Bihu, involves three annual festivals that align with the periods for sowing grain, crop protection, and harvesting.

Paul Keil

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Crossing Paths

In the harvested fields of Gajbari village, traces of an elephant herd intersect with a path that divides the rice paddies. As elephants seek out new sources of food, their lives—like those of the local residents—have become tied to seasonal patterns of ripening rice grain. People report that until 12 years ago, elephants were never seen near the village. Now, every year, herds numbering up to 60 individuals gather in the neighboring forests, waiting for nightfall and the opportunity to raid crops.

Paul Keil

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A Fallen God

The morning after the young adult tusker was electrocuted in Gajbari, locals gathered to see the dead elephant. Many villagers arrived holding their camera phones to take photos of the spectacle. Some also came with their palms raised in prayer and in reverent sympathy for the elephant, a being who shares its body and soul with lord Ganesh. This god is immanent in the world, simultaneously transcendent and embodied in his numerous earthly forms, such as the images and statues worshipped in temples—and the lives of wild and captive elephants.

Paul Keil

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Gifts for Ganesh

People rubbed mustard oil and salt on the elephant’s mouth, and covered his head with vermillion, bananas, flowers, and money. Similar items are regularly offered to Ganesh in temples. In Hinduism, gift-giving is a way of honoring the divine and is a practice learned through formal, ritualized acts of worship. This practice was extended to this impromptu encounter with the elephant god and structured people’s interactions with him.

Paul Keil

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Framing the Sacred

A villager sacralized the dead elephant by placing a banana plant stem alongside his body. In Hindu traditions, the plant is strongly associated with Ganesh, who is the lord of obstacles: His blessing creates beneficial conditions in a person’s daily life. An image of Ganesh is always situated at entrances to temples, and he must be worshipped before all ventures. In Assam, banana plants are used as a gateway for celebrations and auspicious events, and to frame sacred spaces or objects.

Paul Keil

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Reception for a Guest

The fallen god’s right tusk was adorned with incense and a garland of flowers. The decorations were displays of hospitality for the elephant, carefully placed in the hope that they would attract the deity’s gaze and favorable attention. According to locals, Ganesh enjoys being dressed in this manner. Devotees seek to nurture a good relationship with him.

Paul Keil

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Sacred and Profane Touch

Touch is an important part of Hindu worship. It transfers divine power between god and human, and communicates the lower status of the devotee. With the dead elephant, some human contact also turned into a curious exploration of the grooves of his toenails and the wrinkly texture of his skin. The shift between sacred and profane touch is fluid and noncontradictory for the Assamese—elephants are simultaneously god and animal.

Paul Keil

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A Lifeless Body

As a nationally protected species, elephants—dead or alive—are managed by the Forest Department of Assam. In the afternoon, the body was transported by truck to a clearing in the forest near the village, and a veterinarian conducted a post-mortem. He sliced open the elephant’s belly and face, inspected the internal organs for poison, and extracted the tusks. The official treatment of the body stood in stark contrast to its prior veneration. In the end, the elephant was reduced to merely an animal carcass.

Paul Keil

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Honoring the Elephant God

The night after the accident, the gaon burra (village head) dreamed of Ganesh. The god demanded that a temple be built in his honor. Some people feared that elephants would come to destroy the village in retribution for the tusker’s death if they did not follow Ganesh’s instruction. Community members organized a collection and built a small temple on the headman’s property, a few meters from where the elephant died. With this act, private land was converted into a public, sacred space. A statue of Ganesh was housed inside the temple, and this manifestation of Ganesh is now worshipped twice a year on his major festivals, called Jayanti and Chaturti. People hope their offerings will help mediate human-elephant relations in these times of conflict.

One evening in August 2014, a wild elephant was accidentally killed in Gajbari village* in Assam, a state in northeast India. He was a young adult male with tusks, or “tusker,” who, along with two other males, was known to regularly forage at night in the neighborhood. While eating bamboo leaves in someone’s yard, the elephant unwittingly touched a dangerously low-hanging power line and was electrocuted. He died instantly. The next morning, a steady stream of people from the local area visited the body. It was a rare spectacle to see a dead elephant, and villagers were curious to view the animal close-up in daylight. It was also a chance to see and interact with a god.

From 1880 to 2013, 61 percent of Assam’s forests have been lost due to human development, resulting in the destruction, fragmentation, and degradation of elephant habitat. A lack of adequate food and space means that the 5,700 wild Asian elephants scattered across the state have grown more dependent on domestic produce and are encountering people more often. Every night in the months prior to harvest, herds will “raid” village paddy fields, often for rice, which is the primary crop in Assam. Elephants can cause massive economic loss, sleep deprivation, and severe anxiety for impoverished farmers who are desperately trying to protect their farmland. Both humans and elephants become frustrated, aggressive, and sometimes violent with each other when competing over crops, at times resulting in the deaths of either party. The term “conflict” is commonly used to characterize the human-elephant relationship in the 21st century.Yet the complex nature of the interaction between these two species is not wholly antagonistic, and the status of elephants is not simply that of “agricultural pest.” In 2013 and 2014, I spent 18 months doing ethnographic research on human-elephant relations in Assam. The people I worked with considered elephants as too intelligent, aware, and impressive to be mere animals. Many Assamese spoke of how elephants can perceive the hidden intentions and moral character of people. Villagers approached elephants with respect and sometimes communicated with them through worshipful gestures. Elephants seemed to recognize these acts and reciprocate by not disturbing reverent persons. More than simply animals, elephants in Gajbari and the surrounding neighborhood were living, breathing incarnations of the Hindu god Ganesh.

*The name of the actual village has been changed at the request of the author.

Of course it is a sacred creature.. all of life is sacred, thus part of the manifestation of God.

Why don’t some people don’t understand that turning the killing of an innocent creature into some kind of virtue is destructive of the compassionate spirit of the child that is taught this? It is also destructive of the whole culture that normalizes it.

It is a slippery slope: when societies start to teach children that animals were dumb mechanical creatures; that “nature” was be dominated, “tamed” and controlled to our purpose, we will lay the groundwork for treating some people this way too.

If it is okay for wildlife to be shot on sight, if it is okay for animals, wild or domestic, to be exploited purely for financial gain, or even for “public benefit” (which includes both commercialized fishing and the actual tourist traps that are our national “wildlife parks”), then it becomes a “thinkable thought” to ruthlessly destroy whole forest ecosystems just to replace them with commercial plantations, or to consider it an amusing mass entertainment to torture a frightened bull to death.

We have to ask ourselves, just when – and why – did some cultures start to teach their children these things? And does this make it also okey to lock “human vermin” up, use them as slave labour, refuse to help refugee form “shit-hole countries”? Does this make it okay to just lock certain people outside; beyond all hope? is homelessness now equated with “worthlessness”?

What we do to “vermin” animals, we may eventually do to “worthless” people.